Data Centers in Athens

Athens – Strategic Gateway to Southeast Europe

Executive Summary

Athens is establishing itself as a vital digital gateway connecting Europe to the Middle East and Africa. The market is ideal for enterprises needing to deliver low-latency services to emerging economies across Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Its growing ecosystem of data centers and strategic subsea cable landings provides a reliable foundation for regional expansion and content delivery.

Athens: At A Glance

Network & Connectivity Ecosystem

Athens offers a solid and expanding connectivity landscape, making it a strategic interconnection point for traffic flowing into and out of Southeastern Europe.

Carrier Density & Carrier Neutrality: The Athens market is served by over 15 carriers as of September 2025. A growing number of carrier-neutral facilities provide competitive options for creating redundant network architectures.

Direct Cloud On-Ramps: At least one major cloud provider has a physical on-ramp in Athens, with AWS offering dedicated access as of September 2025. This enables direct, low-latency connections to public cloud resources, bypassing the public internet for improved performance and security.

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs): The primary exchange is the Greek Internet Exchange (GR-IX), which facilitates efficient local traffic peering, reducing latency for end-users throughout Greece.

Bare Metal: Bare metal server providers are available in Athens, offering dedicated compute resources for performance-sensitive applications. Options include services from providers like Hivelocity and phoenixNAP.

Power Analysis

Average Cost Of Power: Industrial power in Athens is priced at approximately €0.09/kWh as of July 2025. This competitive rate makes it an attractive location for managing the operational costs of compute-intensive infrastructure. The grid is primarily powered by fossil fuels (around 60%) with a significant and growing share from renewables (around 40%).

Power Grid Reliability: The power grid supporting Athens' main commercial districts is well-engineered and stable. Data centers in the region are built with significant power redundancy, including multiple substations and backup generator capacity, to ensure high levels of uptime.

Market Access, Business & Tax Climate

Proximity To Key Business Districts: Data centers in Athens are strategically located to serve the city's primary economic zones. This proximity provides low-latency connectivity for the financial services, shipping, and technology sectors concentrated in and around the capital.

Regional Market Reach: Athens is uniquely positioned to serve as a digital hub for the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. Its geographical location and subsea cable connections offer an effective distribution point for content and cloud services to Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

Tax Advantage For Data Centers: While Greece does not offer specific tax incentives for data center development, the government has created frameworks to encourage foreign investment. Companies may be able to utilize broader trade financing and investment programs to support their infrastructure projects.

Natural Disaster Risk

Athens has a Low overall natural disaster risk profile, with an INFORM Risk score of 3 out of 10 as of September 2025. While the overall risk is low, specific geological factors require careful site selection.

Key environmental risks include:

• Earthquake: 8.1/10
• Tsunami: 7.2/10
• Coastal Flood: 5.0/10
• River Flood: 3.8/10

Facility engineering and site selection are critical for mitigating seismic risks. Modern data centers in the region are built to high standards to withstand potential seismic activity.